NF (2010) Hoods

by Carl Fellstrom

  In the intervening period, a youth called Levi Walker, whose uncle Barrington Walker had been murdered in a machete attack outside the Marcus Garvey Centre in April 1996, was himself attacked by a gang wielding knives and a machete. They burst in as he slept at his girlfriend’s house in Radford on 21 January 1998. Walker was a regular visitor to Nottingham and claimed that he had been mistakenly identified as one of the killers of Shane Thompson. His attackers had shouted, ‘You killed our brethren Shane and you must die.’ Walker suffered multiple injuries and went into cardiac arrest. He was in a coma for three months. He later recovered enough to carry on his own violent criminal ventures. As part of the Raiders gang from the West Midlands, he would be jailed for life in 2006 for the murder of twenty-year-old Iraq war hero Narel Sharpe in Smethwick, Birmingham. Sharpe was shot dead by Walker as he strolled home after a night out, simply because Walker, who went by the street name ‘Creeper’, fancied the gold chain the soldier was wearing. Walker was also one of the gunmen who pumped five bullets, execution-style, into rival drug dealer and former Spurs youth footballer Kevin Nunes in 2002.

  In March 2000, one of those cleared of involvement in Shane Thompson’s death was severely beaten up: Patrick Wilde suffered a fractured skull when he was set upon by a gang as he walked up Cinderhill Road, Bulwell. Another of those acquitted was soon back in court facing a charge of attempted robbery and malicious wounding after a machete-wielding incident inside a shop on the Meadows estate, while Nicholas Fogo, the St Ann’s gang member, later featured in a number of significant city crimes and was convicted and jailed for life with Ashley Graham for the 2001 murder of thirty-two-year-old Roy Henry. Roy Henry was stabbed through the heart as he tried to prevent a friend being robbed outside the Simply Delicious Café on Radford Road, just a few hundred yards from the police station. The police only turned up after four 999 calls had been made. And Makan Dayil, who had also been cleared in connection with the Thompson killing, went on to become a significant drugs dealer on the Meadows estate. In 2007 he was caught in his girlfriend’s Fiat Punto with a loaded revolver and five bullets during a police stop and search on Queens Drive. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

  In the aftermath of Shane Thompson’s death, firearms became a common tool among the gangs of the NG Triangle.

  CHAPTER 5

  hile Nottingham’s black gangs succumbed to the lure of crack cocaine, eventually imploding, certain white criminals were making a very tidy profit. One team was led by two brothers Wayne and Dean Hardy, who started off helping to run their father’s profitable scrap metal firm and ended up with a multi-million-pound drug-dealing business. These were men who preferred to use their fists than resort to firepower and by staying out of the street gang culture they were able to make millions from a variety of illicit trades. There was also an element of morality to their drug dealing. Cannabis, amphetamines and ecstasy were fine but they never got involved in heroin. Their biggest profits were through the contraband cigarette trade, which at one point was bringing in £70,000 a week. The brothers were always one step ahead of HM Customs – even when a load was busted there were several others going through at the same time, which ensured they were never out of pocket.

  Wayne Hardy was helped by an all-powerful figure I shall call ‘the Taxman’. During the early 1990s, when ecstasy sales boomed, recreational pills and amphetamines were being downed like candy and Hardy was one of the major suppliers into the city. He came a cropper in 1996, however, after investigative TV reporter Donal MacIntyre went undercover as a bouncer and exposed the doorman’s milieu in a two-part World in Action programme. Despite nine months of undercover filming it was not the exposé it had hoped to be, and showed nothing more than doormen dealing in speed, taking steroids and working out in the gym. Ironically the biggest drug deal that takes place on film is when MacIntyre himself splashes out several hundred pounds on a ball of cocaine straight off the block, delivered to him by a nervous-looking black youth. MacIntyre had hoped to entice Hardy into a major drug deal but the drugs went missing when MacIntyre handed over the coke to one of Hardy’s associates, who dutifully told MacIntyre he had to throw it out the car window one evening because the police were following him. The impact the programme had was mixed. It didn’t bring down Wayne Hardy, though it did put the heat on him. A large number of bouncers lost their jobs, only to be re-employed later, and Hardy carried on his exploits.

  A year later, however, the police did catch up with him when he was busted as he drove back to his flat at Aston Hall in Derbyshire with twenty-five kilos of cannabis resin. After pleading guilty in September 1998, he was sent down for three-and-a-half years and a £104,000 confiscation order was placed on his assets. It was pin money to a man who would later have a property portfolio worth millions, with houses in Florida and Cape Town and interests in a diamond mine. After living for a while in South Africa, he returned to Nottingham in 2005 and was approached by Donal MacIntyre to participate in a follow-up programme ten years on from the 1996 sting. But tragedy, which had a habit of pursuing Hardy, struck as talks about the film got underway: he had already had to deal with a girlfriend who killed their young child and then committed suicide, a son with a terminal illness and a daughter who was addicted to heroin. Then his brother Dean, who had also been approached to take part in the programme, was killed by a lorry on Trent Bridge after stumbling into the road just hours after meeting with a film crew. The programme was finally broadcast in 2007 as part of MacIntyre’s Underworld and was titled ‘Wayne’s World 2’. It depicted Wayne as a reformed criminal who was now more interested in helping former associates run pubs such as the Carlton Hotel and the Porchester.

  A few months before the programme went out, Hardy paid a visit to a man called David Gunn at Full Sutton Prison in North Yorkshire. He was there to ask Gunn if he could spare the £80,000 for the drugs that he had supplied to him before he had been arrested. ‘When I get out, Wayne, you can have your money,’ Gunn told him. ‘I hope you can help me out too when the time comes.’

  Another white criminal who became a major player during the 1990s, and who had also been heavily involved in cigarette smuggling, was Robert Briggs-Price. A gypsy, Briggs-Price evaded capture for years even though police knew he was one of the major players in the East Midlands, financing smuggling operations up and down the country. Briggs-Price was a larger than life character. He had grown up with his father’s scrap metal business, even using a horse and cart to collect items like a character from Steptoe and Son. He could not read or write – at least until prison gave him the opportunity to learn – but he more than made up for it with his sharp mind. He was the life and soul of any party, and couldn’t stop boasting, which would be his downfall. By 1999 he had made millions from smuggling cannabis and particularly cigarettes into the UK. He lived in a £500,000 home at Latcham Hall, near Newark, owned the £2.7 million Millgate House Hotel, drove various top-of-the-range cars and sported a wealth of jewellery. He would invite criminal associates round to play snooker or cards at his five-bedroom home, where he felt business could be discussed safely in the relaxed surroundings of a home which boasted a swimming pool and the best security system available.

  A customs operation was already underway targeting Briggs-Price’s cigarette smuggling enterprise and also Nottinghamshire Police had called in the same mystery experts they had used in Operation Odin to plant electronic bugs in his property – they wanted to nail him for the drug running. In the summer of 1999, police set up Operation Long Island, the beginning of a major probe into Briggs-Price’s firm. Special Forces operatives broke into his home and placed a bug in his favourite armchair; devices were also hidden in headrests in his Mercedes and Range Rover. Video surveillance was placed on one of the warehouses he used in Boughton, Nottinghamshire, where contraband cigarettes were being taken, and through one of Briggs-Price’s associates they infiltrated his gang with an undercover officer. The bugs caught Briggs-Price boasting about bringing in a ton of canna
bis every month as well as other criminal ventures.

  Police knew that Briggs-Price was smuggling cannabis but when they heard on the bugs that an associate of his, John Barton, was looking for business partners to help bring in 100 kilos of heroin, they decided they could capitalise on the plan by using an undercover man. Barton had extensive drug contacts in Holland and wanted to use Briggs-Price’s illicit transport network to smuggle £10 million of heroin. An undercover officer, who went by the name of ‘Gerry’, was introduced to one of Briggs-Price’s associates and one evening was invited over to Latcham Hall. Posing as a drug smuggler, Gerry brought with him £200,000 in a bin bag, which he said was to pay off someone in a nearby car park on a deal. At the house, Gerry began counting out the money in full view of Briggs-Price while the others played cards. Briggs-Price’s curiosity got the better of him and soon he was asking Gerry whether he wanted to come in on a deal with him to bring some ‘hard stuff’ into the country. Gerry told him he had good transport connections through an Irishman called Sean, who was in fact another undercover cop, and said he would be interested. More discussion took place over subsequent weeks until Briggs-Price was sold on the idea. He told Barton to get in touch with Sean and to go over to Ireland to sort it out. But someone smelled a rat and Barton told the undercover officers that there were some problems with the shipment at its source in Holland. After weeks of silence, Barton made no further contact.

  On 21 June 2000, police decided they could wait no longer and swooped on a number of addresses, arresting forty-nine-year-old Briggs-Price and forty-eight-year-old Barton in the process. Briggs-Price was alerted to the police raid when officers shouted through a megaphone for him to come out. He peered out of the window of his property, looking perplexed. Police had surrounded the place with armed officers, closing off Great North Road, while the rotor blade of a helicopter whirred above. Briggs-Price eventually appeared at the front door, hands above his head, looking tanned in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts – he had just returned from a holiday in Florida. It was like something out of Miami Vice, except the weather was not up to scratch.

  The case took more than two years to come to court because of the complications over the transcripts of bugged material but, when it did, Briggs-Price felt the full weight of the law. In 2003, he was jailed for seventeen years for the heroin conspiracy and four-and-a-half years for the eight million cigarettes he had brought in. Barton was sentenced to nineteen years for the heroin conspiracy but had amazingly been given bail by a judge and absconded. He is yet to be arrested but was last rumoured to be working alongside a drugs cartel in Spain. Briggs-Price also endured the biggest assets recovery investigation ever undertaken by Nottinghamshire Police. The financial investigators eventually slapped him with a £4.5 million bill, which if not paid would result in extra time in prison.

  By now investigators were beginning to make some clear dents in the organised crime structure which had been saturating the city with drugs. Major players had been taken out with the convictions of Dave Francis, Robert Briggs-Price and Wayne Hardy, the threat posed by the Yardie gangs had diminished slightly and some of the posses who had been controlling the NG Triangle were either spent or had taken their eyes off the ball. By 2001, however, a white crime family was slowly building up its influence in the north of the city. This family appeared on the surface to be unsophisticated, lacking the desire to go beyond their geographical boundaries and living up to their image as mere council estate thugs. Yet the fact was, unbeknown to the police at the time, they had already begun to fill the vacuum left by other crime groups which had been dismantled. They had also forged links with another crime family to the north of Nottinghamshire and were about to unleash a wave of violence upon the city. Led by Colin Gunn, the Bestwood Cartel was about to make itself known.

  ON A COLD, dark, January evening in 2000, a landlord was called out from his home by a tenant. The landlord, Kevin Musgrove, had been pestered all day by complaints about a broken window to the rear of a property in High Street, Kimberley. His tenant was Godfrey Hibbert, someone Musgrove had got to know through dealings at a garage he owned; Hibbert would pop in to get his car tuned up. But there was one thing Musgrove didn’t know: Hibbert, a former heavyweight boxer, was a prolific criminal and had been one of the main players with Dave Francis in the Meadows Posse.

  One day Hibbert overheard Musgrove talking in his garage about the problems he was having getting a tenant and said he might know some people who were looking to rent. A deal was done and the tenants moved in, with Hibbert acting as their guarantor. Musgrove thought nothing more of it. He never met the tenants themselves, and there were a few weeks when the rent didn’t come through and he had to complain to Hibbert, but Hibbert always sorted it out. Then Musgrove received the call about the window and eventually agreed to take a look to see if it could be easily fixed. When he arrived, Hibbert was waiting outside. Musgrove noticed the broken window and decided to go inside for a better look. The doors proved difficult to open but eventually they got in and were confronted by a property which appeared bare and unlived-in.

  ‘Looks like they’ve gone,’ said Musgrove. ‘Done a runner by the looks. But what am I going to do about the rent? You vouched for them, Godfrey, what are you going to do?’

  But the rent was not on Hibbert’s mind. He was worried about something else. He knew something of great value had gone missing.

  Several days earlier, police, supposedly acting on a tip-off from a neighbour who had taken down the registration number of Hibbert’s car after seeing suspicious activity at the rented house, had broken in and discovered 300 kilos of cannabis, worth a potential £1.4 million. The cannabis had actually been at the property for several weeks, having been moved there from elsewhere in the city. It had been bought in Leicester from a major dealer called Tony Singh Hare, later jailed in a huge Leicestershire Police operation. The drugs had been bought by Colin Gunn. Hibbert, who was using a man called Kevin (not Musgrove) to babysit the property, was keeping it safe for Gunn until it could be sold. Having discovered the cannabis, the police moved it and placed a covert camera and listening device in the building, hoping to catch the owners of the drugs. Although it has never publicly been confirmed, the police also almost certainly caught someone after they raided the house on the earlier date – perhaps the Kevin who was merely minding the drugs for Gunn and Hibbert – and turned him as an informant to help catch a bigger fish.

  Hibbert, who was well known to the police, had already been into the property earlier that day. The video camera showed him clearly walking into the house at around 1.40pm and putting his hand to his mouth once he realised the cannabis was missing. So why did the police wait more than five hours for Musgrove to turn up? They would say later that they had missed Hibbert going into the property and the raid that took place at the first opportunity they had to make arrests.

  At around 7pm on 10 January, within a few minutes of the two men going inside, officers from Operation Firecracker swooped. They had no evidence or intelligence that Musgrove was a drug dealer and he answered all their questions dutifully. He was not told about the bug and was not aware of it until a later date but all his answers were honest. Musgrove was, as he was later described in court, a person of good character. However, he was charged with conspiracy to supply class B drugs. Though he was shocked by his arrest and the charges laid by the police, Musgrove at this point still had faith in the justice system. He was sure the jury would be able to see that he was no a drug dealer. But voice analysis experts – at least one of whom was professionally discredited on a later case – were allowed to make claims about the bugged conversations and the jury was allowed to make conclusions about a moment when the two men talk in whispers for a few seconds, implying they both knew there was a bug in the property. Surprisingly, Musgrove was found guilty along with Hibbert. After the High Street bust, officers were immediately able to gain a search warrant for Hibbert’s small jewellery shop, Go Fast, in St James Street, where
, after a second search (the first having been fruitless despite the presence of sniffer dogs), they found about £200,000-worth of heroin stashed in an alcove. Though he was certainly involved in the cannabis shipment, and had a long criminal record, Hibbert was not known as a major heroin dealer and claimed to believe the heroin had been planted: he suspected someone had set him up. Musgrove received an eight-year sentence at Nottingham Crown Court and Hibbert ten years for the cannabis and thirteen years, at a later date, for the heroin seizure.

  After the two were found guilty and led down to the cells, two burly men came to see Hibbert. The pair were heard by people in the custody area thanking him for not saying anything and indicated that they would look after his family while he was locked up. The men were brothers Colin and David Gunn.

  After just a few weeks in prison, Musgrove began asking a lot of questions about who was behind this drug shipment. He got some answers and he started to rattle some cages. Meanwhile his wife Dianne, who had no doubts about her husband’s innocence, put posters and sheet banners around the local area with the words ‘Kevin Musgrove is innocent’ to draw attention to the injustice that she had no doubt has been inflicted upon her husband and family. The posters attracted a lot of attention and news of the campaign reached Colin Gunn. He dispatched four men to the Musgroves’ home, armed with baseball bats, and Dianne and her teenage son were severely beaten. ‘Tell that fat bastard husband of yours to keep his mouth shut,’ one of the thugs warned her. ‘You put any more banners up, we’ll kill the both of you.’ The same evening, Kevin Musgrove’s garage was razed to the ground. The insurance company later told him that his insurance was nullified because of his recent conviction. A few days later, Dianne Musgrove was summoned to a gym used by her son, where some men were waiting to meet her. She was told to answer a mobile phone which was given to her. On the other end was a voice she did not recognise but she was told it was Colin Gunn.